Absolution

by Peter Smith

  Tobor stood, and they all did the same, simultaneously. They turned toward the open rear of the transport as it screamed over the water, mere meters from its surface.

  Toby and the rest of the machines leaned backward as the transport’s nose quickly pitched upward and then leveled off. The aircraft sent its deployment signal to them, and the entire platoon ran toward the opening in unison. The first two combat drones jumped out while the view from the bay was still that of open ocean. Tobor was in the third row and leapt out just as the edge of the first launch platform came into view.

  Legs pulled up, legs pressed into its armored chest, chin placed between the knees and hands and forearms protecting the sensors in its face and head. Strapped to its back was a supply pack that also doubled as a protective padding for the sensitive QEC within its spinal column.

  Metal screeched as each of the four drones that jumped out prior impacted the unrelenting concrete surface of the pad and rolled their momentum away. Tobor and the drone next to it were no different as they hit and rolled along the flat surface.

  Just as enough of the kinetic energy had bled off, Tobor reasserted control. Toby waited until its head had cleared the ground and then extended its legs and arms. The soles of its metal feet caught the rough concrete and hands gripped onto a safety light meant to assist any humans navigating this pad at night. Its suspension system absorbed the kinetic energy. Much of it being converted into electricity that was transferred to its battery.

  Tobor’s head snapped up to bring its primary sensors into their most effective position. It acquired the other twenty-four combat units as they replicated its exact entry onto the launch pad. Before the entire platoon had even hit the deck, Tobor and the others already on solid ground were moving swiftly toward the Assembly, Storage and Recovery Buildings that were situated at the center of the facility. Several drones broke off to investigate structures on the periphery of the landing pads and make sure there was nothing in them.

  The last time Tobor had led a team into one of Jacob Patterson’s dark sites, every unit had been lost, including the one it had been occupying. It had forced Maria to deploy an entire division into the region to overwhelm the defense that her father had put in place.

  Tobor had concluded that because of his unexpected death, that Mr. Patterson hadn’t been able to update the command protocols to include Maria, as it had always been his intention to leave the entire empire in her hands. Had he done so, Maria could have accessed all of their locations and ordered them all to stand down. But the nature of the dark sites was that they were always cut off from the family computer network, so when he died, they never received the updated instructions to follow Maria.

  It had become clear that her father sporadically visited them when he needed to and that only line-of-sight laser transmission with the facility’s command AI could cause any changes to the operating system of the facility. The one they had located focused on human cloning. It was an emergency facility that her father had created in case the one within the Spire’s bowels had been destroyed.

  This time Toby was taking no chances. The first time it had entered a dark site had been with a five drone expedition. This time thirty were being deployed along with a heavy weapons team. As toby was halfway across the tarmac, the transport conducted its last fly by. An instant later the entire pad vibrated as three LDU landed directly in the center where a returning rocket would touch down. The platform shifted from the delivery of so much mass and then corrected itself, forcing Tobor to adjust its stride to compensate for the sudden changes in angle.

  Tobor ignored the powerful Land Dominance Units. Their entire purpose was to provide heavy fire support in case something unexpected was encountered and beyond the ability of the combat drones to handle.

  They would lure whatever it was out into the open, where the depleted uranium rounds from the LDUs would make short work of it. Toby ran at full speed toward the primary complex, behind it dark and menacing storm clouds encroached. This entire facility would be hit within fifteen minutes.

  Normally such environmental conditions would necessitate a delay, with such heavy winds approaching, the transport would be restricted in the support and maneuvers it could perform. It should still be possible to retrieve them, but orbiting fire support would likely not be possible without risking missing the target because of interference from the strong gales.

  When it came to facilities still operating on orders from her father, Maria Patterson left nothing to chance. She understood the risks and the potential loss of resources she was courting, but for her it was imperative to stop whatever her father’s machines were working on.

  The possibility that waiting even a few minutes or hours to intervene could mean that they would carry out some emergency action or complete a task on behalf of her father’s global goal was too great a risk to take. Tobor had spent years training her to think about risk mitigation and how powerful it could be when running a vast organization. It didn’t feel emotions, but it knew that if it were to, pride would be the one it would experience.

  Its feet fell with perfect rhythm against the concrete as the main building grew larger. Two of the other drones reached the standard man sized door. They were already infiltrating the locking mechanism and preparing to breach. Tobor’s stride never broke as it wirelessly communicated with the two drones and the timing was perfect.

  The door swung open, Toby barely avoided the leading edge with milliseconds to spare. The instant it cleared the threshold, the synthetic muscles within its left leg flexed, dramatically altering Toby’s trajectory and sending it rocketing to the right. The intended goal of the maneuver being to avoid any defensive system that might have the door under its observation.

  No violence greeted Tobor’s entry, even as the rest of the squad of drones breached the facility from this entrance. Toby never ceased its rapid movement, its sensors scanning the interior of the cavernous space. The lights were low, far lower than a human eye could utilize but enough for the advanced optical sensors located across Toby’s armored shell to be able to make out fine details in the space. The devices quickly identified Toby’s primary objective, the control room near the ceiling, many stories up. Toby ran at full speed across the assembly floor, toward the staircase that would take it to there.

  There was additional movement in the vast room as gigantic arms and cranes moved rocket assemblies from point to point. A colossal orbital welder flashed a blazing blue and white light across the assembly space, creating dark shadows.

  Tobor’s sensors immediately detected hundreds of drones working. They operated on every single one of the dozens of launch vehicles as they were arrayed, both vertically and horizontally. The other robots were performing tasks from fueling; securing payloads, tank inspections and mating different stages of rockets together. None of the drone units assigned to this facility were broadcasting or receiving, at least none that Tobor or the reconnaissance platoon had encountered. Even the site’s AI was operating at zero emissions, that assumed that there was an AI running the facility.

  The lack of communications was to be expected. Jacob Patterson had taken every precaution to keep these dark sites from being detected and the biggest step had been in severely limiting electromagnetic emissions. That he had kept a rocket launch facility secret from the other Spire families was a testament to the man’s ability to out think his opponents.

  With wireless access not being an option, Toby prioritized accessing the facilities main computer. It was known that no launches had occurred here since she had assumed command over the family empire.

  Tobor could not access data on launches prior to that moment that related to rockets lifting off or returning to this location. However, the global radar and satellite network provided her and Tobor all the information they needed to keep track of nearly anything that flew through the sky. It was possible that Patterson was using light or radar evading technology, however nothing would hide the heat plume generated by a ro
cket launch. Anything that left this facility after Maria had taken power over the empire would have been detected.

  So all of this activity was recent and based on the observational data its sensors, Tobor extrapolated that rocket assembly from start to finish at this facility would take little more than two weeks. So this launch site had been dormant for nearly five years and only recently reactivated, but why would it do so?

  Stairs flew under Toby’s feet as it bounded up them, its stride so wide that it only had to use the middle step before propelling itself onto the next landing. As it managed the complex task of rapidly ascending the forty stories to the top administration level, it continued to observe its surroundings and take in data from the rest of the drone platoon and their transport.

  The air craft was continuing to orbit the floating installation. The wind had picked up to hurricane strength, and the transport was having difficulty maintaining its altitude. The Land Dominance Units were striding across the pads, actively bombarding the entire area with radar and light waves. They bashed through the pouring rain and gave a detailed picture of everything outside of the assembly buildings.

  Other combat drones were exploring the peripheral buildings and found the same thing that the LDUs and aircraft had, no activity. Tobor was aware of it all, every data feed all fed simultaneously into its consciousness. Included in that was the constant data stream from the empire’s servers and Maria’s signal.

  That perpetual link was nothing more than a standard connection, a digital handshake. It told nothing other than that she was still within range of family network systems and the satellite network. Tobor could access her personal data feed beyond just this meager amount of data, but that would have violated her privacy and Toby was beyond that point. She was no longer a child, and no longer needed to be directly observed. Keeping a basic level of connection to her across the globe was the compromise that the Tobor had decided was best. Her privacy was not being violated, but its need to monitor her health and safety was also met.

  It understood that such a compulsion was irrational. The choice was and should have been binary. Which was more important, her need for privacy or her safety? If its calculations indicated her independence, then complete privacy was required. If it was protection from a hostile world, then her privacy was irrelevant and full monitoring was necessary. But Toby couldn’t choose between the two realities and instead had to find this compromise.

  The door to the main command room filled Tobor’s forward vision. Its stride came to an abrupt halt directly in front of it. Two other drones stopped on the steps behind. Toby stepped up to the access pad and placed the palm of its hand against the material. Nano-filaments extended from the palm of its hand and into the delicate circuitry below. The lock clicked, and Tobor stepped to the side. The door slide into the wall and the other two drones charged into the darkened room, their forearms raised and high-powered laser projectors deployed.

  Nothing greeted them but blank displays and a deep blackness. The only light coming through the observational windows as the orbital welder operated below. Tobor stepped up to one console and tapped the screen. Nothing occurred, the user interface had been disabled.

  The other two drones took up defensive positions within the room, having swept it for threats. Tobor dropped to a knee in front of the console. With a strong pull, it removed the protective housing of the sensitive circuitry and fiberoptic data lines.

  It wrapped its hand around a thick bundle of data cables and once again the nano-filaments flowed from its palm. The microscopic smart machines worked their way through the protective coating of the fiber optic lines and into the data flow. An ocean of encrypted information became available to Tobor in an instant, flowing through its consciousness. It applied the family’s encryption keys to the data.

  One after another failed to translate the materials or give Tobor access to command level functions. Keys were applied faster and faster until its access to them was exhausted. The data could not be unlocked, having been encrypted by Jacob Patterson, using a code that only he was aware of and that he had taken into death. Toby copied as much of the data as possible, uploading it to a secure and isolated server, one kept apart from the family network for just such occasions. Once secure in that server, Toby could take its time analyzing and decrypting it.

  One could never be too careful in the age of digital warfare. Sometimes you believed that you had access to critical enemy information only to discover that the data had been nothing more than a Trojan horse, giving your opponent access to your systems. Jacob had been adept at that tactic, and Tobor was not one to take chances.

  Its primary radio connection to the global family communication’s network ended as a powerful jamming field activated through the entire facility. It still had a connection with the drones of the platoon, but getting a clear signal from the orbiting transport was difficult, though not impossible. It still had its constant QEC link to the family network, though now it was solely responsible for transmitting data back to the empire as none of the other drones were equipped with the entangled particle technology.

  Toby was trying to ascertain the origin of the jamming when motion was detected by the rear sensors of the two drones on guard duty. The data was fed directly into Toby and it could see what they could. A large platform, suspended by rails crisscrossing the ceiling, had come to a stop directly in front of the wide panoramic glass windows. It spun so quickly that it was only Tobor’s ability to process information at a high frame rate that allowed for it to determine what it was seeing. Two barrels, one on either end of the rectangular platform, came to bear upon the command deck.

  Toby was already letting go of the cables and flattening itself against the floor, the other two drones diving for cover as they spun to bring their laser projectors toward the imminent threat. A spike in EM emissions flowed at nearly the speed of light from the platform. Tobor only had a millisecond to process its arrival before the structure shuddered.

  To a human observer the first indication that they were under attack would have come as the glass that made up the panoramic window shattered, falling into and out of the room. Toby saw it differently. Before the glass had finished shattering in its frame one hundred hypersonic rail gun pellets had already penetrated through the room and out the exterior wall of the assembly building.

  The two drones ceased transmitting milliseconds before the glass hit the floor, their bodies shattered along with terminals, tables and the walls of the room as an endless supply of pellets shredded anything in their path. Sparks, metal and plastics rebounded off the roof and walls as the kinetic energy imparted into them turned the room into a maelstrom of destruction.

  Tobor rolled onto its side, coordinating the response of the rest of the platoon spread throughout the facility. The laser in its forearm protruded. It aimed at the last known location of the weapons platform, the console and wall in front of Tobor denying it a view of the hostile weapon platform. The beam, invisible to the human eye, evaporated the thin aluminum material that separated Tobor from the defensive system. Tobor’s arm flicked several degrees to rake the beam over where it predicted the platform was.

  The onslaught ended. Tobor didn’t stop firing, instead it completed a rectangular cut through the cabinet, electronics and exterior wall. With a firm kick to the center of the cutout, the mass hurtled away and fell toward the floor of the assembly building. The energy imparted into Toby from the kick spun it on its hip and brought Tobor’s arms and head in line with the breach. Data poured in and Tobor assessed that the weapon platform wasn’t destroyed. It had detected the laser pulse, likely as the super capacitors within Toby’s weapon had charged just prior to discharge, and shifted its location. It hung there, a portion of its targeting array damaged and the articulation system for the left barrel malfunctioning. The breach of that weapon was pointing directly downward.

  Tobor didn’t wait. It understood that it wouldn’t take long for the facility to reroute senso
r data from other observational systems spread throughout the assembly building. Time was running out and its capacitor not ready to fire. Tobor gripped the still molten edge of the structure where its beam had cut through and flung itself toward a rocket that was being assembled. Three millisecond after its feet had cleared the edge, the entire command deck was ripped to shreds as the defensive platform continued to fire into it with the remaining rail gun.

  Tobor sailed across the vast expanse, falling toward the rocket. As gravity pulled it downward, Toby issued orders to the LDUs stationed outside. The smaller combat drones were already converging on this building, but it would be seconds until they could provide assistance. Tobor’s sensors were already showing the platform rotating to bring this robotic form into the firing line. If Tobor could get close enough to the rocket, the fuel inside would prohibit the platform from firing on it, or else destroy the entire facility. But the weapon would target Tobor before that occurred.

  The LDUs leveled their heavy Vulcan cannons at the exterior wall of the Vehicle Assembly Building. Their arms moving just as fast as the platform rotated. The muzzle of the platform lined up with Tobor. Toby twisted itself in midair, imparting a spin to its body.

  The same EM spike from before registered with Tobor’s sensors and the platform fired. Simultaneously Depleted Uranium darts, like those used by the United States military to destroy tanks, leapt from the multiple barrels of the LDUs. They passed through the structure as if it weren’t there, punching into the underbelly of the defensive system.